Fulfillment centers (FCs) encounter more than millions of products daily as they operate to fulfill consumer orders as soon as the orders are placed and enable shipping carriers to pick up shipments. Operations for managing inventory inside FCs may include receiving merchandise from sellers, stowing the received merchandise for easy picking access, packing the items, verifying the order, and package delivery. Although currently existing FCs and systems for inventory management in FCs are configured to handle large volumes of incoming and outgoing merchandise, a common issue arises when a FC receives more than can be fulfilled orders because of flawed validation on a quantity of items inside the FCs. For example, a merchant associated with an FC may display an item as available on its website, but the item is unavailable in the FC because workers in the FC miscounted a quantity of the item. This leads to lost sales and poor customer satisfaction, and a review from the dissatisfied customer may discourage potential sales from other buyers. The flawed validation on a quantity of items inside the FCs may also result a loss in sales of the item when the merchant's website displays an item as unavailable, but the FCs indeed retain the items. Moreover, the flawed quantity may hold up an efficient forecasting on a level of demand for a particular product.
To mitigate such problems, conventional inventory management systems assigned a team of workers to validate a quantity of items inside FC. Different workers would be assigned to enter a location inside the FC to validate a quantity of items and record the quantities. While these systems attempt to validate items in an efficient manner, many times workers receive undesirable locations they cannot validate conveniently. Moreover, current electronic systems are inflexible in terms of validating a quantity of items efficiently. A fixed number of workers validate a quantity of items inside the FC which may result an inefficient use of resources. For example, if first two physical quantities of items, counted by two different workers in a location inside a FC match, then it is a waste of resources when other workers validate the same location. The resources may be better utilized, for example, by enabling the other workers to validate other locations inside the FC.
Therefore, there is a need for improved methods and systems for assigning validation locations and validating a quantity of items in a fulfillment center.